The utility of utilities and RTF-ing man pages

What started me on this path

Exploring your current environment is a great way to learn what is possible to learn.

As I’ve worked on improving my command-line and NeoVIM skills, I had a look at awesome-cli-apps to see what was (comparatively) new and shiny and worth learning.

As a minimal entry point, I decided to try eza: a modern alternative to ls, intended to be more featureful and colorful.

Immediately, I was impressed with the program, particularly the -l flag making chmod-denoted permissions beautifully human-readable without math (although it does make me want to revisit the math behind rwx permissions math).

RTFing man Page

I wouldn’t have known about the -l flag or many others if not for man pages, and I am forever indebted to every mentor who ever heavily encouraged my first command to always be “man “. As I seek out greater breadth of knowledge, it has also been an amazing vector for learning what is out there, and what is possible. It was eza’s env variables that let me in on a project I’d never seen before.

I would’ve never known about NOCOLOR

Hidden below all the flags and options in the eza man page is a short entry:

NO-COLOR Disables colours in the output (regardless of its value). Can be overridden by –color option. See https://no-color.org/ for details.

So I went to no-color.org for details, and found an excellent little corner pushing adoption of a standard way to disable colors in the terminal, only for those who don’t wish to see them.

A great project to stumble upon, and a wonderful consideration as I tumble down the open source rabbithole.

I’m not sure what the next utility I adopt will be, but I am sure discovery awaits.